In U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/545,926, ('926) Redmann teaches a mechanism enabling remotely situated musicians to collaborate using acoustic instruments thereby creating a remote or distributed performance.
The '926 system operates by capturing acoustic signals generated by the locally performing musician, e.g. from his microphone or electric guitar output. The resulting electronic audio stream is sent to each of two places: First, and immediately, to all of the remote musicians via a communication channel. The communication channel can be one or more voice telephone lines, but is preferably a packet network connection, for example comprising the Internet. Second, to a local buffer having a delay substantially the same amount of time as the communication channel has latency to the others. Upon arrival at the remote location(s), substantially coincident with the local delay elapsing, the audio is played at each of the stations substantially simultaneously; i.e., a brief moment following the original performance. The originating musician listens to his own performance with the local delay, preferably through headphones.
However, the '926 system suffers from one significant drawback: The musicians have no audience. Other than those participating in the peer-to-peer interconnection that comprises the jam, there is no audience.
Further, were any audience members to be collocated with a musician participating in a jam, there is no separation between their utterances such as cheering, applause, and the like, and the performance itself.
Further still, the interconnection mechanism of the '926 system is optimized for low latency, but at the cost of a complete interconnection among the jam participants, which places an increased bandwidth requirement on each participant for each additional peer added to the jam. In such a scenario, a large number of audience members would produce an untenable bandwidth requirement for individual performance stations under '926.
Conference call systems exist which allow a presenter to be heard by all call participants. Some systems permit other call participants to be heard by everyone as well. Often, such conference calls are implemented with expensive voice bridges. However, there are network-based telephone applications, such as Skype by eBay, Inc of San Jose, Calif., which are implemented using VoIP technology, and which can provide conference calls in small numbers, in the case of Skype up to about five people without a separate voice bridge server. However, for large numbers of participants able to hear each other, voice bridge servers require significant network infrastructure and large amounts of centralized bandwidth. Products such as Skype that run on personal computers are, to date, significantly limited in the count of participants.
Separately, classes of self-organizing peer-to-peer networks have been developed. Of particular interest is the Distributed Hash Table, or DHT. The principles and exemplary uses of DHTs are described by Ali Ghodsi in Distributed k-ary System: Algorithms for Distributed Hash Tables, his PhD dissertation to the Royal Institute of Technology, School of Information and Communication Technology, Department of Electronic, Computer, and Software Systems, Stockholm, Sweden, December, 2006. Distributed Hash Tables, also known as structured overlay networks, (SON), are well suited to building scalable, self-managing distributed systems.
A different, but related organizing principle is taught by Boris Mejías, et al, of Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium, in Improving the Peer-to-Peer Ring for Building Fault-Tolerant Grids, CoreGRID Workshop on Grid Programming Model, Grid and P2P Systems Architecture, Grid Systems, Tools, and Environments, FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, Greece, Jun. 12-13, 2007.
These peer-to-peer overlay networks provide algorithms that permit an ad hoc group of stations, each of which only needs to know how to connect to at least one station already in the organization, to interconnect and manage their organization. Such peer-to-peer organizations have not previously been shown to support a virtual auditorium environment. However, the capabilities for self-organization and self-maintenance is exploited in the present invention to achieve an interconnection of nodes streaming multimedia among themselves without excessive investment in server capacity and bandwidth being required from any central server.
Thus there remains a need for a way to permit audience members, preferably in large numbers, to listen to a live performance such that the performers experience the response (e.g., applause, shout-outs, laughter, etc.) of the audience, in substantially real time. Such an audience may extend across neighborhoods, cities, states, continents, and even across the globe.
There is a further need to admit to such an audience individuals having a right to attend, such as holding a ticket or subscription.
There is a further need for the audience to receive the live performance reliably and resiliently, for instance in the case of commonplace disruptions in a network such as the Internet or as might be induced by the unanticipated removal of a peer from an organization of stations.
The present invention satisfies these and other needs and provides further related advantages.